Читать книгу Murder, Eh? - Lou Allin - Страница 4

The stink of gas exhaust announced an unwelcome presence long before Belle Palmer heard the distant, guttural chug of an ATV. Twenty minutes earlier, she’d squinted in suspicion at a rusty white Ford 100 truck parked at the schoolbus turnaround at the end of her remote road along Lake Wapiti. A cleated metal ramp on the tailgate meant that a rider was already on the Bay Trail. Freya, her German shepherd, had given the bottom of the steep hill a thorough sniff, squatting to pee proprietorially in an arbutus bed.

Moose season was over a month away, though that wouldn’t prevent a bold poacher from filling his freezer illegally. She had made a mental note of the Ontario “Yours to Enjoy” license plate: AHCK 245. AW HECK, bring a 2-4 at 5. If she heard shots or saw fresh signs of ad-hoc butchering, reporting the plate would be a pleasure. The Ministry of Natural Resources had the right to search and seize vehicles and even check a residence for contraband meat.

Stopping on the forest path a kilometre later, she spied broken ferns and crushed bracken where the macho machine had left the trail, then looped back. Too lazy to hike into one of the interior swamp lakes and perch in a tree stand? Over the years, hunters had erected three or four in the vicinity. Then around the next blind turn beside a grandfather yellow birch came a rider wearing work pants and a ubiquitous red plaid flannel shirt. The green monster Yamaha Grizzly 660 quad had a large wooden box attached to the rear carrier, and a water bottle dangled from the handlebars.

On a whistle, Freya moved to Belle’s side, and she placed a gentle hand over the chain collar for safekeeping. Shepherds were extremely wary and very territorial. This was their province, Crown land though it was. Belle could have sworn the old dog narrowed her eyes.

“How are you today, madame?” the man asked with a warm smile, cutting the engine. He had no accent, but the last word made him a Francophone, sans doute.

“You tell me,” she said with a cold expression, folding her arms. “What are you after this time of year? Bear, I suppose. Make sure it’s a boar, or don’t you care about orphaned cubs?” Curiously, she saw no gun, just a belt knife with a bone handle.

He switched off the engine, his crinkled, butterscotch eyes confused at her hostility. Attractive as Sean Connery in Robin and Marian, he could have been anywhere from fifty up, unshaven, but with a healthy head of salt and pepper hair under a very odd pink knit cap with earflaps.

“Why so unfriendly? I’m a licensed trapper,” he said with a slight frown and a hurt tone, as if the final word, which would enrage urban PETA members, should be a cachet with bush dwellers. “I have a right to trap here.”

“Trap what?” she asked, as a whiff of pong met her nose. Not death, but pungent, foul and laced with hormones.

The man got off the quad and walked to the rear carrier, which he opened to display a large beaver, flat on its back, paws folded over its belly like a medieval bishop atop his marble tomb.

“Male,” she said. “Wheew. How do you stand that reek?”

“Don’t hardly take notice of it after my beak goes numb. Not until I get home and the wife gets downwind of me before I hit the shower.”

Suspecting the source of the ridiculous hat, Belle relaxed for a moment, waving her hand. “I’m not that fond of beavers.” Many waterside poplars and birch had been destroyed by overambitious rodents gnawing down trees too big for their abilities or girdling skyscraper aspens, leaving them to wither. With beaver hats in disfavour since the American Civil War and coats a dangerous fashion statement, the mammals were overbreeding. Obstructive dams often pooled water in the interior, then burst forth into streams, flooding out nearby homeowners.

“What do you get for a pelt these days?” she asked. Fur might be making a comeback, but times had been lean for decades. He didn’t finance that ten-thousand-dollar machine on this career.

“Hell, no more than twenty bucks at the North Bay fur auction,” he replied. “This is just a sideline since I retired from Mother INCO.”

Sudbury’s International Nickel Company together with little brother Falconbridge had employed over twenty thousand people in their Seventies heyday. Now only six thousand remained on the payrolls, but thanks to modern technology, still produced the ore for one-fifth of the world’s metal. Until recently, increasing numbers of retirees barely maintained a shrinking population as the young left for greener urban pastures down south or out west. Since miners often started work at eighteen, the trapper could have retired before fifty, a just reward for half a life underground.

“Word was passed on to me from a survey team on the Nickel Rim South Project about a nuisance pair back there at the swamp lake. They’re putting in a tailings pond, and you know how these watercourses all connect up,” he explained.

The new mine. Flags from surveyors had started showing up everywhere, paths chopped into the forest. How she resented intruders with heavy lug tires despoiling the trails she ambled. Boys and their toys. “So that’s it for you in here, then?” she asked in a brusque tone, still cautious as she remembered the strange deviations into the bracken. Beware of men bearing dead beavers.

He rummaged in a canvas pack, handing her a wooden apparatus the size of a shoe box. “I’m scouting places to put up a few of these.”

“What are they?”

“Marten traps.”

Belle clamped her jaw in recollection of the rare sight of the dry-land counterpart of the familiar mink, a boreal forest inhabitant. Weighing in at only a few pounds, the weasel family members were fond of blueberries, a signal feature in their small scat, usually on a prominent rock in the middle of the trail. Wild animals had a sense of humour. She was unfamiliar with the finer points of trapping, but alarms were ringing. “Where do you put them?”

He pointed down the trail. “You might have seen that fir grove near where I drove off. Martens make their dens in conifers. So I nail these on.”

She peered into the trap, a coffin with a cruel spring vice inside. “What’s the bait?”

He waved his gnarled hand, red with toil. “Hamburger. Porkie strips if I catch one. Martens are fierce little creatures. Take your finger off.”

Belle’s stomach churned in disgust. Martens were rare and shy. She’d seen only a few in her lifetime, these cousins of Herman the Ermine, who lived under her boathouse and kept mice at bay. “And what do you get for their skins?”

“Around sixty bucks. Enough to add a bit of Christmas cheer.”

She flipped back the trap. “Make sure you don’t catch any dogs in the process of accumulating that cheer. My friend’s mini-poodle could crawl into this.” She turned away and stalked back down the trail, calling over her shoulder. “Too much trouble to go to the real wilderness? Why not use the bus and trap downtown in Bell Park?”

Before he could reply, she was gone around a turn, walking as fast as her mid-forties legs could carry her. Though Freya bounded ahead, the walk was spoiled. She felt her blood pressure simmering. Hunters, quadders, snowmobilers. Now trappers. Was she living in a North of 60 rerun? Her once-peaceful road with barely a dozen full-timers now had over forty. What next? An Indy 500? A Wal-Mart?

Stopping to catch her breath and savour one last moment, she admired a sleek apricot mass on a maple tree. One-inch-by-two, it encased the Hebrew moth’s eggs. She had wondered, weeks ago, why the sand-brown creature with dark script-like markings was biding quietly. Stopping the next day, she had perceived the patient laying, a velvety covering protecting the hatch from winter’s savage assault. Gently she stroked the case like a present to open in spring.

Taking a deep breath, she headed back to the trailhead and along Edgewater Road. As she came to the “An Old Crow and a Cute Chick Live Here” sign with gaily painted cartoon birds, she turned into the driveway of her retired friends, the DesRosiers. Ed was tinkering in the open garage with his snowmobile, a snazzy Phaser, too rich for her blood, and as a pensioner nearing seventy, too fast for his. The Northern version of a sports car convertible.

He gave a wave, and their chocolate-red mutt Rusty ran up for a pat, grovelling on the ground in submission. Freya was her elder, so she respected her status. “Come on in for a coffee. Catch up on the news about these damn murders,” Ed said, wiping his hands on a rag.

She groaned, wrenched back to civilization with its own terrors in the night. “It’s the lead story for all the media. I’m glad I live out here, or am I?” She told him about meeting the trapper.

“Ford 100, eh? Had one myself. Three hundred thousand K and had to beat it to death. Don’t see many of those old guys. I’ll keep an eye open.” Ed had forged his own paths far into the woods decades ago and had a healthy suspicion of strangers. A recent hip operation had cancelled bush hikes, and even he drove a quad down the road occasionally to give neighbours a hand with their plumbing, his former profession. If cake was served, it wasn’t his fault.

Passing a small oak festooned with plastic juice jugs of seeds, she noticed the rose and grey splashes of a pack of pine grosbeaks chattering in the branches.

Inside, around the corner in the kitchen, Hélène was rolling out pastry. “Decaf’s fresh. It’s all we drink now that Father has angina.”

Ed grunted as he propped up his fancy carved cane in the corner. “I’m not your father, woman. Or I’d take you over my knee.”

“Baby those knees. The health care system’s not your personal orthopedic clinic.”

A Swedish enamel woodstove in the large living room maintained an even temperature in the cooling afternoons, though their floor-to-ceiling windows in the cedar bungalow led to bitter complaints about hydro bills. Belle took off her jacket and pulled up a chair at the combination kitchen and dining room table. Dusting off her hands, Hélène poured coffee and presented a heaping plate of Nanaimo bars. “Low-cal. Made them with sweetener.” She plopped down a bottle of French Vanilla Coffeemate. “This has no fat at all. Or do you want two per cent milk?”

“Milk’s fine.” Paint had no fat either, but she wouldn’t drink it. Belle tested the confection. Nuts, cocoa, butter. Hélène took no shortcuts. With curling grey hair and an urge to feed the world, she filled the role of an older sister or perhaps a younger mother. Ed’s belly scooched over his belt like a bag of flour. His slim wife, with energy to burn, never glanced at a scale.

A copy of the Sudbury Star lay on the table. Belle gave it a scan. “No arrests yet. Not even a person of interest, or whatever they call it.”

Ed cocked his head toward a .22 mounted on the wall. “A lady’s best friend. City folks ought to keep one handy.”

“My shotgun’s wrapped in a garbage bag in the basement rafters. Safe from thieves but hardly handy,” Belle said. “And no, it’s not registered.”

“ ‘Peace and good government’ is our country’s motto. Not ‘Life, liberty and a handgun in every drawer.’ ” Hélène paused thoughtfully. “I worry about my girlfriends in town who live alone.”

Belle nodded, taking another bar. It was only three o’clock, not that close to dinner. “Radio said that a task force is already on the job. Maybe there will be a break this week.”

“Everyone’s talking. Even my cousin Bea is concerned for her female workers.”

Bumble Bea Bakeries. The venerable family business downtown had been a legendary source of luscious breads and pastries. Hélène had said that Bea’s grandfather named it for her.

“I have some news about her that might concern you,” Hélène said with a mischievous grin that brought out her dimples.

For Belle, good news came in colourful pieces of paper bearing the pictures of prime ministers. Fall was a slack time for realtors, especially in cottage country. Such a cheat to enjoy the property during the fleeting summer then opt to sell in the fall, except what buyer wanted to freeze in an uninsulated camp with no water until the following May? Didn’t Bea live in her grandfather’s home on John Street overlooking Lake Ramsey? The city’s first luxury homes had been erected there early in the last century by upper management at the mines. Now it was an enclave of doctors, lawyers and other professionals with six-figure incomes. “Am I going to owe you? I’m five dinners behind.”

Hélène stirred her coffee with leisure, pulling out the moment like saltwater taffy, gauging Belle’s cash-register eyes. “Bea wants to sell the property and move to a smaller home, maybe in the Kingsmount area.”

Sell. The musical ride. She took a sharp breath. “That deal could be worth a million or more, depending on the lakefront. A thousand a foot on serviced lots.”

Hélène shrugged. “They used to own acres, but her father tore down the old coach house and sold parcels on either side in the Sixties to finance the bakery’s expansion.”

One dismaying thought entered Belle’s mind. “How old is the place?”

“Cayuga House dates from the twenties, eh?” Ed said as Hélène nodded. “Brass plate by the door like it was owned by some English lord.”

Belle was already calculating her commission. Every sale counted for the smallest realty in town. “If the house is that old, a new owner might demolish it. Time, roofing and plumbing march on. I’ll bet that the heating system needs an overhaul, too. There’s a dinner at Verdicchio’s in your future if I ace this.” She named the most expensive restaurant in town. The bill could qualify as a tax deduction.

“I don’t think you’ve ever met her. Bea is such a dear, and what she’s gone through.” Hélène’s face lost its customary sunshine and turned sombre.

“Health problems? Or please don’t tell me the bakery’s going belly up. Their sweet rolls are better than yours, and you wouldn’t deny it.”

“I gave Bea the recipe.” Hélène recounted how seven years ago, her much younger cousin had lost her husband Michael Bustamante and six-year-old daughter in an accident on Lake Ramsey. “Bea saw it all from her garden. July 1st holiday, it was. Mike was canoeing with the girl, life jackets of course, when a drunk driving a speedboat blasted into them. Mike died instantly of head injuries. Dear little Molly . . .” She stopped, gulping back a sob.

Ed patted her back with his walrus paws and turned to Belle. “Couldn’t get her to stop crying for a week.”

“The propeller. Her injuries were traumatic.” Reaching for a tissue, Hélène continued. Left to raise her five-year-old son, Michael Junior, Bea had married Dave Malanuk a year ago, a fundraiser for local charities. He’d adopted the boy, but left him his birth father’s name.

Belle hardly knew what to say except to make compassionate female noises. Some families were magnets for tragedy; others skated free and complained about hangnails.

“Malanuk. I know that name. Didn’t he organize the Run for the Cure?” With a memory of her co-worker Miriam’s breast-cancer scare, Belle had jogged five miles and collected two hundred dollars from her neighbours.

Hélène nodded, wiping her soft grey eyes. “He’s a wonderful guy. Just what she needed to restart her life.”

“Sounds like a solid man.” Belle couldn’t imagine the challenges of a single parent. “Kids need a father.”

“It’s been bumpy. Micro loved—”

“Micro?” Belle leaned forward as if she’d misheard.

Hélène blew her nose and managed a smile. “Michael Junior. Kids and their nicknames. Computers or something. Anyway, he loved his father and won’t accept a replacement. Problems spilled over his last year in elementary school. A bullying situation.”

Engrossed in the sports section of the paper since Hélène had calmed down, Ed finally joined in. “Some rotten kid stole his lunch. Micro was just standing up for himself. Nothing wrong with a good shove.”

Ed reached for a fifth bar and received a tap on the hand from his vigilant wife. “I remember our sons at twelve, don’t you, Ed? Always testing limits.” He grunted, and she continued. “And shamefully enough, for some ignorant people, there is his ethnic origin.” Belle guessed from the context that she used “ignorant” in the sense of “rude,” a Northern trademark.

“Bustamante? Sounds Italian, like your side of the family, or is it Hispanic?”

Hélène gave a bittersweet sigh. “No one ever said Bea didn’t know her own mind. When she was thirty, still unmarried, pouring her life into the business, she took a singles’ cruise and met Mike in Kingston, Jamaica. Love conquered all. It was a fairy-tale marriage. He was a fine doctor. Once he’d qualified in Ontario, he set up an office in Onaping, where they’d been without a general practitioner for years.”

“She must have been a brave woman.” In large metropolitan areas, interracial marriages were common, but not in the North, where people of African or Caribbean descent had been as rare as roses in May. Hélène had spoken of the benighted days in which a mixed marriage involved a Catholic and a Protestant.

“Bea was an only child, so she had her father wrapped around her pinkie, and his word was law with the relatives.” She began to chuckle, poking Ed. “Except for Great-Great-Aunt Mafalda. Eighty-eight. Five feet of firecrackers. Pounded up to the main table at the wedding. ‘Have to see this darkie for myself,’ she said, waving her cane. Mike just gave a bow and tamed her like an old pussycat.”

“A darkie. You have to be joking. Shades of Stephen Foster,” Belle said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

Ed added, “We had the family over for fishing this summer. Dave pulled out all the stops. Took Micro to Ramakko’s for new tackle and gear. Didn’t he land a big pike off the rock wall. He’s a quiet lad, but a good boy. Give them time. They’ll get over this.”